The Camp Fire Girls at School eBook

“Some friend of the patient,” explained
the head nurse. “Hoffman let her in himself.”
The young girl in question was Medmangi. Dr. Hoffman
knew all about her ambition to become a doctor and
allowed her to come into the operating room.
So she began her career by witnessing one of the most
inspired operations of a widely famed surgeon.

When Sahwah came out of the ether she felt as if she
were held in a vise. “What’s the
matter?” she asked dreamily. “I feel
so stiff and queer.”

“It’s the cast they put you in,”
answered her mother.

Sahwah moved her arms carefully to see if they were
in working order yet. Lightly she touched the
hard substance that surrounded her hip bone.
“They didn’t cut it off, did they?”
she asked in sudden terror. She could not tell
by the feeling whether she had two legs or one.

Dr. Hoffman, coming in in time to hear the question,
snorted violently. “Don’t talk such
nonsense, Missis Sahvah,” he said, waving his
hands emphatically. “Dot limb is still
vere it belongs, and vill be as good as ever ven de
cast comes off.”

The watchers around the bed that day wore very different
expressions from what they had worn all week.
Just since yesterday despair had given way to hope
and hope to assurance. Her mother and father and
Nyoda hovered over the bed with radiant faces, and
the Winnebagos, after seeing Sahwah’s favorable
condition with their own eyes, retired to Gladys’s
barn to celebrate. The rules of the hospital forbade
the amount of noise they felt they must make.
Dick Albright smiled his first smile that day since
the night of the accident.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE HONOR OF THE WINNEBAGOS.

“For High Style use the Preterite,
For Common use the Past,
In compound verbal tenses
Put the Participle last.
The Perfect Tense with ‘Avoir’
With the Subject must agree
(Or does this rule apply to the
Auxiliary ’to be’?).”

Migwan, in high spirits, resolved the rules in her
French grammar into poetry as she learned them.
Regular lessons were gotten out of the way as quickly
as possible these days to give more time to the study
of history. And to Migwan studying history meant
not merely the memorizing of a number of facts attached
to dates which might or might not stay in her mind
at the crucial time; it was the bringing to life of
bygone races and people, and putting herself in their
places, and living along with them the events described
on the pages. Taking it in this way, Migwan had
a very clear and vivid picture of the things she was
learning, and her answers to questions showed such
a thorough knowledge of her subject that she was regarded
as a “grind” at history, while the truth
was that she did less “grinding” than the
rest of the class, who merely memorized figures and
facts without calling in the aid of the imagination.
So Migwan learned her new history and reviewed her
old, and was as happy as the day was long.